Goldman Sachs’ Top Growth Investors: 34 Stocks With The Highest Investment For Growth

18. Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL)

Growth Investment Ratio: 109%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 53

Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL) is a major US-based cruise ship operator. As has been the case with its peers such as Royal Caribbean, the firm is also seeing a resurgence of cruise ship demand in 2024 after volumes collapsed during the pandemic and consumers struggled with inflation. Like its peers, Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL)’s hypothesis depends on its bookings, capacity utilization, pricing power, and oil prices. For bookings, the firm’s third quarter saw it achieve a new record of $7 billion in customer deposits. Its limited capacity is also enabling Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL) to charge higher prices, and despite stronger pricing power, the firm has already booked half of its inventory for 2025. In short, provided that inflation continues to fall and consumer spending remains high, Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL) could continue to experience tailwinds in the future.

Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL)’s management shared details about its 2025 bookings during the Q3 2024 earnings call:

“Looking forward, the momentum continues as we actively manage the demand curve. At this point in time, 2025 is a historical highs on both occupancy and price. All core deployments are at higher prices than the prior year. Every brand in our portfolio is well booked at higher pricing in 2025, demonstrating the ongoing benefit of our demand generation efforts throughout our optimized portfolio. Our base loading strategy is continuing to work well, allowing us to take price, thanks to having pulled ahead on occupancy. In fact, in the last three months, our 2025 booked positions price advantage versus last year has actually widened for the full year and for each quarter individually. And with nearly half of 2025 already booked, we feel confident in maintaining our trajectory.

While early days, the benefit of our enhanced commercial performance is carrying nicely into 2026 as we just achieved record booking volumes in the last three months for sailings that for out. This incredibly strong book position for 2024, 2025 and 2026 drove record third quarter customer deposits towards $7 billion, and that’s along with continued growth in pre-cruise purchases of onboard revenue. It’s also gratifying to note the onboard spending levels were not only up strong again this quarter. Our year-over-year improvement in onboard per diems actually accelerated from the prior quarter. In essence, all demand indicators are continuing to move in the right direction.”